Barbara Blomberg — Volume 05 eBook

Religion, he asserted in the fervid manner characteristic
of him, was in these times the axis around which turned
the inner life of the world and every individual.
He himself had resolved to live for the object for
whose sake it was worth while to die. He knew
the great perils which would be associated with it
for one of his warlike temperament, but he had become,
by the divine summons, an evangelical theologian, a
combatant for the liberation of the slaves sighing
under the tyranny of Rome. A serious conversation
with a friend who was a German and resisted yielding
to a movement of the spirit which was kindling the
inmost depths of the German nature, thoughts, and
feelings, and was destined to heal the woes of the
German nation and preserve it from the basest abuse,
would be to him inconceivable.

Wolf interrupted this avowal with the assurance that
he must nevertheless decline a religious discussion
with him, for the weapons they would use were too
different. Erasmus, as a theologian, was deeply
versed in the Protestant faith, while he professed
Catholicism merely as a consequence of his birth and
with a layman’s understanding and knowledge.
Yet he would not shun the conflict if his hands were
not bound by the most sacred of oaths. Then
he turned to the past, and while he himself, as it
were, lived through for the second time the most affecting
moment in his existence, he transported his friend
to his dead mother’s sick-bed.

In vivid language he described how the devout widow
and nun implored her son to resist like a rock in
the sea the assault of the new heretical ideas, that
the thousands of prayers which she had uttered for
him, for his soul, and his father’s, might not
be vain.

Then Wolf confessed that just at that time, as a pupil
in the school of poets, he had come under the influence
of the scholar Naevius, whose evangelical views Erasmus
knew, and related how difficult it had been for him
to take the oath which, nevertheless, now that he had
once sworn it, he would keep, even though life and
his own intelligence would not have taught him to
prefer the old faith to every new doctrine, whether
it emanated from Luther, from Calvin, or from Zwingli.

For a short time Erasmus found no answer to this statement,
and Wolf’s old nurse, who herself clung to the
Protestants from complete conviction, and had listened
attentively to his words, urged her young co-religionist,
by all sorts of signs, to respect his friend’s
decision.

The confession of his schoolmate had not been entirely
without effect upon the young theologian. The
name of “mother” also filled him with
reverence.

True, his birth had cost his own mother her life,
but he had long possessed a distinct idea of her nature
and being, and had given her precisely the same position
which, in the early days of his school life, the Virgin
Mary had occupied.

To induce another to break a vow made to his mother
would have been sinful. But a brief reflection
changed his mind.